Various systems have been developed to automatically fill large quantities of prescription bottles for use primarily in mail order pharmacies. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,208,762 to Charhut describes an automated prescription bottle filling system sold by Automed Technologies, Inc., under the trademark OPTIFILL®. The system automatically fills, labels, caps, and sorts prescription bottles in accordance with prescription orders stored in a database.
Some automated prescription dispensing systems are carrier-based. Such carrier-based systems have been well-known and widely used in the prescription dispensing industry for over a decade. An example of a carrier-based system is the AUTOSCRIPT II™ system originally manufactured by Automated Prescription Systems (now McKesson Automated Prescription Systems) in the early 1990s. Another example of a carrier-based system is illustrated in Lasher et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,771,657. In both of these systems, carriers loaded with empty prescription bottles are transported to dispensers containing various prescription drugs, where each bottle is filled with the prescription corresponding to the prescription information on the bottle label.
A significant limitation of both carrier and non-carrier based dispensing systems is their lack of ability to effectively accommodate prescription bottles of multiple sizes. Charhut describes a non-carrier system that uses a conveyor lane to pass a row of bottles under an automated filler. As illustrated in FIG. 2 of Charhut, the system has three conveyor lanes. Bottles of three different sizes are filled by assigning each bottle size to a conveyor lane. This approach has a number of shortcomings. First, the system requires a separate conveyor lane to handle each different bottle size. Second, because a single customer order will often comprise several prescriptions having bottles of various sizes, the system requires a sorting conveyor to sort the bottles coming off the three conveyor lanes into customer orders. This sorting subsystem reduces the efficiency and speed of the system and introduces an additional step into the process, with an accompanying opportunity for system malfunction or error.
In Lasher, bottles of various sizes are loaded onto assigned locations on a carrier for filling using a conveyor-system like that described in Charhut. Lasher describes a bottle carrier having bottle wells arranged in a 4×6 array. As shown in FIGS. 4A and 4B of Lasher, the wells are sized to accommodate two standard bottle sizes. The leading row consists of four wells sized to accommodate four large bottles and the remaining five rows consist of four wells sized to accommodate twenty small bottles. According to Lasher, this breakdown is a close approximation to the anticipated requirements for large and small bottles. However, in practice, the actual combination of bottles of each size needed for a given set of prescription orders varies widely and is difficult to predict. Thus, in addition to other limitations of the system disclosed in Lasher, the carriers often will not have the optimal number of wells of each size actually needed. Consequently, bottles must often be placed in a queue to wait for a well that fits or carriers with empty wells must be processed through pill dispensers. These shortcomings can significantly reduce the output rate of the dispensing system. Moreover, customer orders must often be split over multiple carriers if the various sized bottles of an order cannot be accommodated in the available wells of a single carrier. Because the bottles of a single customer order may be split over multiple carriers, the system requires a carrier consolidating system, comprised of a turntable and other complex mechanisms, so that all of the bottles of an order can be removed from multiple carriers for packaging and shipping. The carrier consolidation system is shown in FIG. 7 of Lasher. Like the sorting system in Charhut, this carrier consolidation system reduces the efficiency and speed of the system and introduces an additional step into the process, with an accompanying opportunity for error.
Thus, there is a strong need for a system that allows multiple sized bottles to be loaded onto a conveyor system for filling, which avoids the need for sorting or consolidating carriers after filling. The system of the present invention provides these and other advantages.